26. Dedication

I hope you enjoyed reading Thereafter as much as I enjoyed writing it. Please just take a moment to understand its dedication. Sometimes in life people are taken too soon. We use the word ‘taken’ because we want to blame someone when most of the time there’s no blame to give. If you’re lucky enough not to have death shake you, you are a luckier human than I. I have, in the past few years, known a lot of death.

But as John Green famously wrote, “pain demands to be felt”. And I felt it hard and strong and for a long time while writing this novel.

This book is dedicated to all the people we wish were still here.

If you saw your flowers like Abia, I hope you’d be proud of what we’ve written.

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And because you can't go back and post before any of your old chapters, here is Thereafter's dedication meant to go before chapter one :

For Abbey Parker and Bradley Cooper and those we love more than we can express.